Looking up at Stars

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"We catched and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next."
—MARK TWAIN, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"


 extract from "Laying on our backs, looking up at the stars" "4th of July"
by Garrison Keillor, 1988

"There was much more: about racial hatred, pesticides, radiation, television, the invincible stupidity of the government and whether Vietnam was the result of strategic mistakes or a reflection of evil in American culture—it was a conversation with concrete shoes, and while I can be as grim and pretentious as the next person, when I hear the word "culture" I reach for the doorknob. I snuck out to the screen porch with my son and sat and listened to crickets, and my friend Greg sat with us and I recall that two others joined us, all of us tired of apocalyptic politics and talk, and we walked along the driveway out of the yardlight and through the dark trees and sat down in a strip of alfalfa between the woods and the oats. ("What's that?" they said. "Oats," I replied.) And then we lay down on our backs and looked up at the sky full of stars.

The sky was clear. Lying there, looking up at the hemisphere of billions of dazzling single brilliances, made us feel we had gone away and left the farm far behind.

As we usually see the sky, it is a backdrop, the sky over our house, the sky beyond the clotheslines, but lying down eliminates the horizon and rids us of that strange realistic perspective of the sky as a canopy centered over our heads, and we see the sky as what it is: everything known and unknown, the universe, the whole beach other than the grain of sand we live on. The sight of the sky was so stunning it made us drunk. I felt as if I could put one foot forward and walk away from the wall of ground at my back and hike out toward Andromeda. I didn't feel particularly American. Out there in the Milky Way and the world without end Amen, America was a tiny speck of a country, a nickel tossed into the Grand Canyon, and American culture the amount of the Pacific Ocean you bring home in your swimsuit. The president wasn't the president out there, the Constitution was only a paper, and what newspapers wrote about was sawdust and coffee grounds. The light I saw was from fires burning before America existed, when the Crandalls lived in Rhode Island. Looking out there, my son lying on my chest, I could imagine my grandchildren and they were more real to me than Congress.

I imagined them strong and free, curious, sensuous, indelibly cheerful and affectionate, openhanded—sympathetic to pain and misery and quick in charity, proud when insulted and modest if praised, fiercely loyal to friends, loving God and the beautiful world including our land from the California coast to the North Dakota prairie to faraway Manhattan, loving music and our American language—when you look at the stars you don't think small. You don't hope your descendants will enjoy your mutual fund portfolio, you imagine them as giants on the earth.

Between the tree line and my left elbow, a billion stars in the sky, each representing a billion we couldn't see. We lay in the grass, thinking about America and also slightly about snakes and about spiders clambering from blade to blade who might rappel down into our mouths, and looked open-mouthed up at the heavens and everything we said out loud seemed hilarious to us. Tiny us gazing up at The South Wall of The Unimaginable Everything and feeling an obligation to comment, and our most profound comments sounded like peas dropped in a big empty bucket. "It makes you feel small, doesn't it." Plink. "I used to know the names of those." Plunk. One more peabrain having to share the effect that the world is having on him. "It's beautiful, isn't it ... I remember when I was a kid—" someone said and we laughed ourselves limp—shut up, we said, laughing, we're sick of sensitive people, everything you see just reminds you of yourself! So stick it in your ear.


The Revolution was launched in frustration and anger at the mess that greed and arrogance make in the world (and most of the Declaration is as angry as what was said around the kitchen table), but the Revolution was harnessed to a great idea thought by men who lay on the ground and looked up at the stars. Or so I thought, lying there in the alfalfa. Perhaps in 1776 they too were rattled by current events and the perfect logic of despair and had to go out and lie in the weeds for a while. Indoors all the news is secondhand, mostly bad, and even good people are drawn into a dreadful fascination with doom and demise; their faith in extinction gets stronger; they sit and tell stories that begin with The End. But one look at heaven can restore our spirits to their natural immensity and blessedness, and we feel free, and the idea of liberty becomes larger. The sentence about equal rights does not sound small or ridiculous when you recite it while looking at the stars:


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.


The stars in the sky, my friends in the grass, my son asleep on my chest, and a fly flew in my mouth, and went deep, forcing me to swallow, inducing a major life change for him, from fly to simple protein, and so shall we all be changed someday, but meanwhile: Life! Liberty! and (huff huff pant pant huff huff) Happiness!"